To 6pac & others who may have been experiencing the same problem as me:
I tried 6pac's suggestion and it worked to a certain degree. However, I found it worked much better by going to TOOLS > OPTIONS > FILTERS > JUNK but instead of ticking the DISPLAY JUNK option, I clicked the RESTORE DEFAULTS option > APPLY. That, so far, has brought my search results back to the way it used to be.

NB: you may have to restart your computer before the default is applied. Also, you may wish to go through the other various OPTIONS fields to re-configure how Limewire downloads, uploads, views & searches etc for your particular requirements (because they also have probably reverted back to the DEFAULT setting).

Regards,
Mickster